How do pirates take over such huge ships?

[xotoxi]

"How do pirates take over such huge ships?"

Pirates are wily.

 

[WorldAHope]

"How do pirates take over such huge ships?"

Pirates are wily.

They don't always target large ships (some guys just love going after the big fat ones....), they target just about any possible ransoms. In that area, the piracy has spread away from the more heavily patrolled Straits to less protectible open ocean shipping lanes.
Big problem. Lots of money to protect those important shipping routes. Last count there were more than 60 naval ships from several nations on patrol in that area, and more US navy supply ships in support of the patrols. The US has been picking up most of the tab, so far.
This incident will cause the piracy problem to get a lot more attention, fast.
Who votes for a good sized invasion and occupation force being sent into of parts of Somalia again ?

 

[WorldAHope]

"How do pirates take over such huge ships?"

Pirates are wily.

They don't always target large ships (some guys just love going after the big fat ones....), they target just about any possible ransoms. In that area, the piracy has spread away from the more heavily patrolled Straits to less protectible open ocean shipping lanes.
Big problem. Lots of money to protect those important shipping routes. Last count there were more than 60 naval ships from several nations on patrol in that area, and more US navy supply ships in support of the patrols. The US has been picking up most of the tab, so far.
This incident will cause the piracy problem to get a lot more attention, fast.
Who votes for a good sized invasion and occupation force being sent into of parts of Somalia again ?

Hostage dies as French attack Somali pirates - CNN.com

updated 23 minutes ago


Hostage dies as French attack Somali pirates

(CNN) -- A French hostage and two pirates died Friday in a rescue operation off Somalia, the French president's office in Paris said Friday.
The luxury yacht, Tanit, was captured by pirates off Somalia last weekend.

The luxury yacht, Tanit, was captured by pirates off Somalia last weekend.
Four hostages, including a child, were freed from the hijacked yacht after almost a week of captivity, Nicolas Sarkozy's office said.

The French military decided to move in when pirates refused their offers and increased threats against the hostages, it said.

A defense ministry source told CNN the pirates were threatening to execute their captives.

The four adults and a child had been held aboard their yacht, the Tanit, since it was seized in the Gulf of Aden on Saturday, the president's statement said.

 

[eots]

I've been up close to those container ships. How in the heck do a bunch of pirates in a motorized skiff pull up alongside of and stop a ginormous freighter doing 20 knots?

Very confused. It seems as though the guys on the freighter would be laughing from 10 stories up, and it also seems the pirates would be easy targets for a couple plinkers on deck of the freighter.

Am I missing something? (obviously).

they only go about 8 knots and are essentially floating coke cans...and when traveling with a load the deck is surprisingly close to the waterline..

 

[mightypeon]

The issue goes way beyond mere piracy: Somalia is a hotbed of Al Qaeda activity and has been for years. My guess is that the hijacking of these ships is for the sole purpose of raising money for Al Qaeda, and if that is true, it makes the piracy issue one of grave international concern.

Now - will any nation (or for that matter, The UN) have the testoserone to go in there - do the right thing - and clean house? When pirates along the Barbary Coast plundered international shipping in the early 1800s, The United States Marines went in there and kicked their pirate asses and put them out of business.

RWC

I would suggest you to read up a bit of history, than awnser with the nation which actually did most of the final anti Barbary pirates fighting. Hint, its an European nation that stayed where the Barbary pirates are coming from until after WW2.


Apart from that, the barbary pirates where defeated by telegraph poles.

The US stopped beeing targeted a lot even earlier, since Portugal and England had something of a join effort to seal off Gibraltar.

By the way, 90% of the somalian pirates will have better things to do with there money than giving it to Al-Quaida.

 

[Peejay]

Put a bounty on the heads of the pirates.

Deploy decoy vessels, loaded with armed mercenaries.

Form an international blocade off the Somalia coast.

Mine the coast line.


There are a lot of things to do, short of an invasion of Somalia.

 

[krotchdog]

How do pirates take over a huge ship, you wait until its safe, you wait until the most liberal democrat president ever, obama to take over, you watch to see if he bows to the king of saudi arabia, if obama bows, you know he is one of you and that he will cede authority to the king of saudi arabia, once you see those signs you know its safe to take over the ship.

 

[Rightwngcrkpot]

From the jungles of Somalia to the shores of Tripoli -
We will kick some pirate asses - and we'll do it with much glee!
We will throw them to the sharks for bait - just to hear their mournfull screams -
And will teach them a hard earned lesson from The United States Marines!!!


RWC

 

[cbi0090]

Yeah, they might have to pay the crews a living wage.

But hey, don't worry about it.

Americans will inevitably pay to protect those ships anyway.

That's what Americans are good for.

Paying to protect everybody's interests but their own.

It wasn't wages that ran the shipping industry out of the U.S. It was Valdez. Maritime law has never held any ship liable for anything more than the value of the vessel and it's cargo. This has been in place for hundreds of years. Valdez changed all that here in the U.S. It actually took an act of congress to override international maritime law and make Exxon liable for the cost of the spill. Once that happened the liability costs of operating a cargo shipping line in the U.S. became too high and they all moved to Monrovia, Panama, and such.

Where do you get this crap?

American Maritime industry was dying long before the Exxon Vadez incvident.

True, as we became less and less of an exporter our maritime industry became fewer but what really brought the hammer down was the change in liability and the precedent set by the Valdez incident. If Valdez had been a Russian tanker, do you think they would have paid for the clean-up? International maritime law would only have allowed us to sue for the value of the ship and its cargo.

 

[user_name_guest]

The reason why they can get onto freighters from their boats because they have high verticals. Just check the NBA and you can understand why.

 

[sealybobo]

From the jungles of Somalia to the shores of Tripoli -
We will kick some pirate asses - and we'll do it with much glee!
We will throw them to the sharks for bait - just to hear their mournfull screams -
And will teach them a hard earned lesson from The United States Marines!!!


RWC

Can you imagine how bad Bush or McCain would have fucked this up?

Who am I kidding, just like during the surge when Bush paid the Sunni & Shiite insurgents billions of dollars to stop shooting our boys.

The surge worked my ass! How about caving into and paying terrorists worked.

And actually, I don't see them as "terrorists". The Sunni's and Shiites in Iraq were fighting for their own freedom.

McCain would have flown in and he would have crashed his airplane and ended up a POW in Somalia for the next 5 years.

 

[Iriemon]

How do pirates take over a huge ship, you wait until its safe, you wait until the most liberal democrat president ever, obama to take over, you watch to see if he bows to the king of saudi arabia, if obama bows, you know he is one of you and that he will cede authority to the king of saudi arabia, once you see those signs you know its safe to take over the ship.

You are confused. Obama took office in 2009; Bush was president before that.

 

[krotchdog]

I've been up close to those container ships. How in the heck do a bunch of pirates in a motorized skiff pull up alongside of and stop a ginormous freighter doing 20 knots?

Very confused. It seems as though the guys on the freighter would be laughing from 10 stories up, and it also seems the pirates would be easy targets for a couple plinkers on deck of the freighter.

Am I missing something? (obviously).

Ya, your missing something, your brain, I cannot imagine a question any more stupid, thats why I did not take the time to explain to fairmont the many different ways to scale a wall while your buddys cover your climb with Ak-47's

Iriemon, uh, duh, uh, thanks for uh.......the history lesson, uh, duh

I see why you post like a moron in my thread, I forget my post over here.

So to answer your question first lets break it down to its basic form

Fairmont asks basically, how do I climb a wall. On second thought if I told you, you would get out of your baby crib and than little fairmont would get in all kinds of trouble.

 

[Missourian]

Their decision to abandon the vessel that their company was paid handsomely to protect attracted some criticism. One Western aid official in the region told The Times that after calls for commercial vessels to hire security guards, it was “somewhat ironic that they jump overboard to save themselves”.

Their British employer, however, insisted that the three former soldiers were heroes who had resisted a sustained attack by heavily armed pirates with great courage and would have been killed if they had stayed any longer. “They were unarmed. They had no other option. As far as I’m concerned they deserve a medal,” said Nick Davis, a former British Army pilot who runs AntiPiracy Maritime Security Solutions (APMSS) out of Poole, Dorset. Mr Davis said his guards were unarmed because it was almost impossible to carry firearms through Customs and on to vessels in most countries, and because ships with cargoes of chemicals or gas seldom allowed weapons on board. The ship concerned, the Liberian-flagged tanker the Biscaglia, was carrying a cargo of palm oil.

British and Irish anti-piracy experts rescued - after pirates attack - Times Online (site has pop-ups)